Introduction: The HypermetropolisFrom my first visit as a tourist, Mexico enchanted me. I kept returning, but for four years didn't dare set foot in Mexico City. I was afraid of the capital, influenced by the propaganda dismissing it as a teeming, overpopulated, polluted bedlam, full of horrific testimonies of insuperable poverty. I imagined the armless beggars of Calcutta brandishing their stumps in tourists' faces, hoping the display would result in a handout.
Then, during one holiday in 1987, I had a layover in Mexico City. In the hour-long taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, I fell in love. I was astonished by the streets of the centro histórico, lined with massive stone buildings constructed by the Spanish conquerors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I was captivated by the contrast between the grandiosity of those structures and the humility of the office workers wending their way through the sidewalks— the smiling shoeshine man at his electric-orange post, thedoughy matron in the blue skirt and white apron beseeching me tobuy tacos sudados—"sweaty tacos," so called because they aresteamed in a basket.
That afternoon I sipped coffee on a hotel balcony overlookingthe zócalo, the city's enormous central square. A crowd began togather in support of a teachers' strike. By twilight they would beone hundred thousand strong, yet an hour later everyone was gone,the plaza empty, as if it had been a hallucination.
At night I wandered along those streets dense with history, litso dimly they appeared to be in black-and-white. In a crowded cafeteria,I ate tamales wrapped in banana leaves and stuffed withspicy pork. I drank tequila in a dark bar, where a round man withslick hair and a pencil mustache sang romantic songs, backed bythree guitar players dexterously crowding notes into each phrase.
I stumbled upon Plaza Garibaldi, the rowdy nocturnal soul ofthe city. Squadrons of musicians, mostly mariachis in skintight,tin- studded black suits, trawled for customers willing to pay a fewpesos for a melody. When they found temporary patrons, throngsgathered, and the most boisterous revelers sang along. It was acrowded Friday night, and the result was the most singular cacophonyI'd ever heard.
In Garibaldi's most humble cantina, La Hermosa Hortensia—which dispenses pulque, a fermented cactus beverage created bythe Aztecs—a staggeringly drunken man offered me his wife. Shedemonstrated her eagerness to consummate the proposition with asqueeze of my thigh and a smile, the seductiveness of which wasundercut by the absence of several crucial teeth. I refused with asmuch courtesy as possible, after which the man removed from hisneck, and gave me, a string that held an emblem of Mexico's patronsaint, the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Before I went to bed, half-drunk in the wee hours, I watched alonely group of soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms on drill in the otherwiseempty zócalo. Unfortunately, I had to leave the next day. Ihad been utterly seduced by the constant sensations of contrast,surprise, even tumult. Within three years I would be living there.
That Mexico City was such a beguiling place came as a complete surprise.The 1980s were surely the worst moment in its history. Threemillion autos, the thin air of its 7,300-foot altitude, and the thirteenthousand factories that ringed the valley in which it is situatedcreated an ecological nightmare with toxic levels of pollution.
The pumping of a billion gallons of water per day from as faraway as fifty miles caused the city to sink 3.5 inches a year, and thelack of adequate plumbing and drainage made it a nightmare formany of its residents.
Said to be the biggest city in the world, by the early 1980s MexicoCity had a population of seventeen million, and the governmentpredicted that there would be thirty-six million by the year 2000.Most of the new inhabitants were squatters, streaming in from theimpoverished countryside at a rate of a couple of thousand per day,creating slapdash shantytowns on the ever-expanding outskirts.
In the immediate aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 1985the government seemed to disappear into thin air, and it was up tothe citizens to rescue one another from under the rubble. Not onlywas there a lack of viable leadership, but politicians and policechiefs were noted more for how much they stole from the publictrough than for any constructive projects they carried out.
If Mexico City today is still a challenging and sometimesexhausting place to live, with permanent service problems (principallyin drainage, water pumping, and distribution) and a continued resistance to urban planning, it is worth pointing out that theworst predictions from the 1980s did not come to pass.
While pollution levels may still be unacceptably high, the situationis no longer a noxious horror. Since 1991, all new cars herehave come with catalytic converters, and although four million orso make traffic a nightmare, they are not causing as much lethaldamage as they did twenty years ago. Most of the factories in thevalley have closed down, making way for a greater service economyand cleaner air. Plumbing has reached virtually 100 percent ofthe city, even in the most impoverished outskirts.
Mexico's is the second most dynamic economy in Latin America,after Brazil's, but its wealth is scandalously distributed. WhileMexico City's gross domestic product is over seventeen thousanddollars U.S. per capita, half of the capital's residents live at or nearthe poverty level, and about 15 percent beneath it. At the sametime, virtually everyone has a roof over his or her head, electricity,running water, and a TV set. More than half have cell phones. Ifsomeone starves to death in the capital, it is an anomaly. (This is incontrast to other parts of Mexico, mainly rural, that the UnitedNations has compared to Africa for their destitution.)
That effectively everyone in Mexico City eats goes a long wayin explaining why the population has held fairly steady since theearly 1990s, increasing by only a few million souls. Word finallyreached those rural Mexicans who flooded the city for decades thatthe capital was no longer providing survival or sustenance as it hadbefore. Those same Mexicans began to stream across the borderinto the United States, and continue to do so, despite mountingpolitical pressure from the U.S. government to stop their flow.
It is no longer "the biggest city on earth," if it ever could havebeen accurately counted as such. Others such as Los Angeles havea far greater land mass, and several years ago the Tokyo-Yokahamacorridor replaced Mexico City as the world's most populousmetropolis. Numerous other cities, although with fewer residents,have far greater population density. Mexico City has eighty-fourhundred people per square kilometer, while Mumbai, Lagos, Karachi,and Seoul have more than double that figure. Bogotá, Shanghai,Lima, and Taipei also are significantly more jam-packed.
If Mexico City is a demanding place to live, it is also an extremelyrewarding one. The hypercity, the ur-urb of the American continent,it is improving all the time as a cultural capital, with offeringsmore along the lines of First World cities than any other in LatinAmerica. Its scores of museums and galleries have produced artistswho exhibit around the world. On any given night there is an extensiveselection of theater (classical, contemporary, experimental),film (mostly from Hollywood, but also from France, Japan, Romania,or Argentina), music (from the local symphony orchestra, to anavant-garde jazz combo from New York, to touring rappers fromBeirut), and public presentations of just-published books.
There are limitless choices of food and drink. Mexican cuisineis unique; its play of colors, textures, temperatures, and flavorsmakes it the culinary jewel of the continent. One can sit in thecocoon of an elegant restaurant (choices include not only Mexicanfood, but the cookery of Poland, Lebanon, Japan, France, or Catalonia)or else be tempted by the open air; in Mexico City there is acomplex street theater to the food stalls, enticing passersby withassorted aromas and hues.
Paradoxically, given its population of twenty million, there aremany tree-lined neighborhoods with the quiet sociability of smalltowns, while others have the generic international-hip vibe onefinds around the Bastille in Paris, Williamsburg in New York, orSoho in Hong Kong.Its citizens may be savages when behind the wheels of their cars,but on the street there is a level of courtesy today found in few citiesin prosperous countries. In the capital, waiters in cantinas shakehands with their familiar customers, and after your food has beenserved at a restaurant, people at the next table are likely to saybuen provecho (the local equivalent to bon appétit). People holddoors open for each other, say good morning when they walk intoan elevator, kiss each other's cheeks when they are introduced. Ifyou sneeze in public, a chorus of voices says salud. It sometimestakes five minutes to get out of a taxi until all of the ritual phrasesof "At your service" and "Have a good day" and "Take care ofyourself" have been exchanged.
Mexico City was founded by the Aztecs in 1325 as Tenochtitlán.Built on an island in Lake Texcoco, within the next two centuries,through an inspired system of man-made islands, canals, andcauseways, it grew into the seat of the Aztec empire. By the timethe Spaniards arrived in 1519, Tenochtitlán was one of the world'slargest cities, with a population of about two hundred thousand.It was a city of pyramids and palaces, the majesty of whichstunned the conquerors. Nonetheless, the Spanish promptly destroyedthat city and built their own stone citadels atop the ruins. MexicoCity became New Spain's headquarters. Much of the colony's CentralAmerican and Caribbean assets were administered from the capital.The colony lasted nearly three hundred years.
The capital's history in the nineteenth century was marked byviolence. After the War of Independence liberated the country fromSpain in 1810, the battles were internal, but in 1847 the UnitedStates invaded Mexico City, and the upshot of the resultant occupationwas the sale of half of its territory at bargain-basementprices to its northern neighbor. From 1864 to 1867, Mexico wasoccupied by Maximilian of Hapsburg, who built the splendidChapultepec Castle in the heart of the capital. The last decades ofthe century were marked by the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz,whose governing style was known as pan o palo (bread or thestick) : those who marched in line for him received sustenance,while those who disobeyed were met with brutality. Mexico'sentrance into the modern era was also turbulent, with carnagerocking the capital not only during the Revolution of 1910, butcontinuing well into the subsequent decade.
After peace was restored, by the middle of the twentieth centuryMexico City was known for its fresh air, clear skies, and for beingLatin America's most cosmopolitan capital. At this point, while thecity's growth was under control, each new neighborhood basicallyimitated the historic center of the city, usually spreading outwardfrom a tree-lined square with the area's most important church andlocal government buildings. Yet in the second half of the twentiethcentury, Mexico City became the poster child of contemporaryurban chaos and overdevelopment. Between 1950 and 2000, itspopulation grew from roughly three million to about twenty million.
The city expanded horizontally in all four directions, swallowingand engulfing other towns, villages, and municipalities in awilly-nilly, ad hoc manner. During those fifty years, what passedfor urban planning allowed for no more than catch-up, reactivemeasures. For example, the inner-city throughways, such as theViaducto and the Periférico, became obsolete almost as soon asthey were completed, given how quickly the population and its fleetof cars grew during the years they were built.
Apart from the obvious problems of traffic and transportation, thegrowth created other confusing complications. Today, out of the city'seighty-five thousand streets, there are about eight hundred fifty calledJuárez, seven hundred fifty named Hidalgo, and seven hundredknown as Morelos. Two hundred are called 16 de Septiem bre, while ahundred more are called 16 de Septiembre Avenue, Alley, Mews, orExtension. Nine separate neighborhoods are called La Palma, fourare called Las Palmas, and there are numerous mutations: La Palmita,Las Palmitas, Palmas Inn, La Palma Condominio, Palmas Axotitla,La Palma I y Palma I-II Unidad Habitacional.
Today, greater Mexico City is composed of the Federal District,home to approximately eight million residents. The other twelve millionlive in nearly sixty municipalities in Mexico State, which makeup the rest of the urban sprawl to the east, west, and north. The FederalDistrict is divided into sixteen delegations (the equivalent of boroughsin New York, subregions in London, or arrondissements inParis), each with its own somewhat autonomous government. Onlyfour of the delegations are considered the center of the city. Like mostbig metropoli, Mexico City is divided into smaller, sharply contrasting,and mostly self-contained neighborhoods that are called colonias.There are about five thousand in greater Mexico City.
Compounding the city's complications is the fact that the FederalDistrict exists in a political and judicial limbo. It is neither astate nor a territory that belongs to another state. It is not sovereign.For most of its budget, it is dependent on the largesse of the federalgovernment, to which it has had an increasingly antagonistic relationshipin the last decade or so. Although it generates about half ofthe country's federal taxes and close to 25 percent of Mexico's grossdomestic product, the Federal District receives only about sevencentavos for every peso it delivers to the national treasury, asopposed to the states, which receive about double that amount.
It is an architectural eyesore. In any given neighborhood, sometimeswithin a block or two, there can be an elegant nineteenth-centurymansion next to a squat and brightly painted Art Decoapartment house. Close by will be a pink Swiss chalet adjacent to amodernist nightmare that rises from the ground in the form of atube. Around the corner is a gray concrete bunker opposite thehusk of a construction that crumbled in the 1985 earthquake.
Although it has a few distinctive monuments, such as the statuesof the Angel of Independence and Diana the Huntress on thebroad avenue Paseo de la Reforma (the city's answer to the Champs Élysées),Mexico City defies physical description and lacks notableiconography. A few neighborhoods, such as the centro, San Ángel,and Coyoacán, have lovely colonial architecture, while quite a fewmore (Condesa, Juárez, Narvarte, Santa María la Ribera) have ArtDeco or neo colonial buildings. But the pretty areas are exceptions.Architects describe Mexico City as "short and fat," given the numberof one-, two-, and three-story buildings in its seemingly infiniteland mass. Many of those buildings are unfinished, with rebarsprouting from the top in anticip...
